BECAUSE I WAS BORN INTO THIS WORLD
The island...it’s to save Eldia. But...it’s more than that. What was really beyond the walls was nothing like the world I dreamed of. It wasn’t like the world I saw in Armin’s book. When I learned that humanity lived beyond the walls I...was so disappointed. I wished for it, I wanted to wipe it all away.
Eren, learning about the existence of humanity living beyond the walls, felt disappointed. The world he learned about was so different from the world he dreamed since Armin showed him his book. The endless landscapes and pure scenery he imagined, the “flaming water, frozen plains, snowfields on sand” were the only things that Armin’s book talked about, but they were not the only things they would find in the real world: humanity, indeed, lived all the time all throughout this world. And Eren, learning about this, wished for something: to wipe it all away, to bring humanity back to nothing.
We thought it was for the sake of Eldian people, in order to save his friends that Eren decided to start the massacre of all the humanity that lived beyond the walls. However, things turn out to be quite different. Reading those lines, I thought that the real motives that are truly behind Eren actions, the decision to start the rumbling and to exterminate humanity, actually lies in his irrepressible, primal desire for freedom.
During his entire life, Eren has felt captured in a cage, trapped in a world of walls. Because of this, I think he came to develop a sense of hopelessness, the feelings of not being able to do anything in order to reconquer the freedom that had been stolen from them. He continued to repeat to himself to fight, not because of his strong will, but because he sees no other ways to live, but to destroy all the enemies, to strive to fight ‘till the end.
Oh the other hand, his mind ended up in developing a twisted, absolute (latin etymology: absolutus, from ab: from, away from, and solutus: perf. part. of solvo: to untie, to release, thus: unlimited, perfect, absolute) concept of freedom. The freedom that Eren is fighting for, the scenery that he dreams of is a boundless, unlimited sky, a world without restrictions, hence a world with nothing and nobody in it. Every living creature, every last one of those animals has become a threat to what freedom means to Eren, a restriction that has to be wiped out, in order to reach that sight, to be able to see that scenery. In order to see it, he is willing to exterminate all human beings. Despite his feelings of sorrow, what he desires the most is that freedom.
Eren, in his inability to give freedom a different meaning, he’s a slave to his own desire, which is dragging him into be the most cruel mass-murderer that the world has ever seen. The rumbling is destroying all the lives on earth, human beings, every living creature, EVERYTHING THAT WAS EVER BORN INTO THIS WORLD. But.
It’s because I was born into this world!!
As Eren stated himself, his freedom originates from him being born into this world. His desire to go to see the outside world, his desire for freedom, started from this simple, yet undeniable and beautiful answer: we’re all free, because we’re all born into this world.
But Eren, decided to start the rumbling, is now destroying this same world. Eren discovered that the real world, the world where he was born, was nothing like the world he dreamed of. A putative world of freedom, an empty world with nothing and nobody restricting you is where Eren is willing to live on now. He is aware now of all the senselessness, all of the cruelty that inhabits this world, and he has made out of his mission to wipe out all of it, believing that, at the end of this path, an infinite, absolute freedom will be attending him.
However, an “absolute” freedom, or to be untied from any connection with anything and anyone (as Eren is also trying to do with the closest people to him, Mikasa, Armin and the others), is not what a human being should hope for. In order to reach such unlimited freedom, Eren is now destroying the entire world, because, in the reality, no “absolute”, no absence of restraints is possible. There’s no way one could simply cut his ties with the rest the world, and since the world we inhabit is populated with other human beings and other living creatures, there will be always a limit, something with which we should deal. The only reason why someone would desire for a world like this is the loosing of any hope, the belief that there’s nothing more that one could do, that is not possible to be free AND to live in this world. Eren firmly believes that the rumbling is the only way for Eldian people to survive. He thinks that what he is doing is necessary, that fighting is the only possible way for them. “If you win, you live. If you don’t win, you die.”
My personal opinion, however, is that Eren is missing what the real freedom is. It is not something that you can obtain by wiping out all the enemies standing in front of you, it is not something that you find in misery and extermination of the obstacles that you encounter. The real freedom that one could find in this world can not be an infinite one, because that is a freedom that you could find only in an empty, undeterminate world, like a vast blue sky, where you find nothing but that unique scenery. Instead, freedom is something that humans can obtain by choosing this world, through the commitment to make it a better place, making choices that would connect us with other people, consequently shaping our existence and determining what the world we live in will be. This is what the Alliance, by choosing to try to stop the rumbling, has chosen to do. However, this freedom is only possible if we believe that, despite all the senselessness and suffering, there’s still hope: maybe something we don’t know about yet, and the possibility to choose.
“It wasn’t the world we dreamed of. But I still want to believe that there’s still a world we don’t know about yet out there, past the walls”.
